There’s a bit of a rock-star theme to our #RivetingReviews this month. Anna Blasiak – our Riveter magazine poetry editor – reviews the first collection in English from Polish star poet and rocker Marcin Świetlicki, while our regular crime-fiction correspondent, Barry Forshaw returns with books by two stars of European mystery writing, Georges Simenon and Gunnar Staalesen.

Max Easterman tackles Paolo Maurensig’s latest novel, which fictionalises the life of an unrecognised Indian chess star from the 1930s, while a new reviewer, Dymphna Flynn, makes her Riveting Reviews debut with a novel by a star of French writing, Delphine de Vigan.

Our own ELNet rising stars, Rosie Eyre and Alice Banks, cover a stellar Swiss novel and sparkling Catalan minimalism, respectively, while Paul Burke gives us two reviews this time, about a dystopian future and an unsettling present.

We make good literature the star of everything we do at the European Literature Network, so enjoy these riveting insights, and watch out for our star-studded cast of Dutch writers at the online launch event for The Dutch Riveter next month.

We’re taking a break from #RivetingReviews in March, as we’ll be dazzling you with our Dutch Riveter content, but we’ll be back in a twinkling, in April.

Finally, the new star of the bookselling world – bookshop.org – enables those of us working in literature and publishing to promote the titles we’re involved with and earn a little cash from doing it. So from this month, we’ll curate a list of our reviewed books for you to buy on our new bookshop.org page: uk.bookshop.org/shop/elnet/. Buy through the page, and you’ll be supporting ELNet with a few much-needed pennies. 

–West Camel, #RivetingReviews Editor